The Vatican Apostolic Library and the Japanese firm NTT DATA on Thursday signed an agreement that will result in the rapid digitalization of 3,000 valuable historical manuscripts over the next four years. It’s the first step in the planned digitalization of all the 82,000 manuscripts preserved in the Library.

The overall project, which was started by the Vatican Apostolic Library some years ago and is currently ongoing with an initial output of 6,000 manuscripts, is intended to digitally archive all manuscripts preserved in the Library, amounting to some 82,000 specimens and 41 million pages.

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The initial collaboration between the Vatican Apostolic Library and NTT DATA, worth approximately EUR 18 million (USD 22.6 million or JYP 2.3 billion), will cover about 3,000 documents over a four-year period.

“The manuscripts that will be digitized extend from pre-Columbian America to China and Japan in the Far East, passing through all the languages and cultures that have marked the culture of Europe,” said Monsignor Jean-Louis Brugues, archivist and librarian of the Holy Roman Church.

Gary Price (gprice@mediasourceinc.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area. Before launching INFOdocket, Price and Shirl Kennedy were the founders and senior editors at ResourceShelf and DocuTicker for 10 years. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com, and is currently a contributing editor at Search Engine Land.